French Presidential elections aren’t until May 2012, but judging from the finance ministry’s recent statements you’d be forgiven for assuming voters are poised to enter the polling booths any day now.

The finance minister and the budget minister have issued three separate statements in the last few days dedicated solely to picking holes in proposals from the French Socialist Party.

The aggressive critique in official statements of comments from senior party members and candidates in the Socialist presidential primaries comes after the arrival of a new ministerial team at the finance ministry following the departure of Christine Lagarde to head the International Monetary Fund.

It underscores that public finances are set to take center stage in the election campaign against the backdrop of a deepening euro zone debt crisis and as France attempts to rein in its deficit and secure a top-notch triple-A rating.

Until May 14th, a Saturday, you wanted Dominique Strauss-Kahn to translate favorable surveys into reality, get the party backing—and yours—at the primaries, and go on to outvote Mr. Sarkozy in the presidential election runoff next year.

You might even spend some time mourning the political death of your champion. But life goes on. You pull yourself together, and decide to pick another Socialist candidate, hoping he or she will emerge as a clear winner at the party’s primaries, in October. It’s a second-best choice, but it can still work: both Socialist frontrunners, Francois Hollande and Martine Aubry, can push Mr. Sarkozy out of the Elysee, polls say.

Then, last Friday, you’re watching a TV broadcast for a New York courtroom, and suddenly it looks like DSK’s case may be collapsing. Your champion is back? Will you be able to vote for him? Maybe…

Despite France’s international image as a left-leaning country, only one Socialist–François Mitterrand–has won the presidency in the half-century history of the 5th Republic. Now, with President Sarkozy’s approval ratings at record lows, the 2012 presidential election had looked like the party’s big chance.

Despite such an advantage, many in the party were pinning their hopes on Mr. Strauss-Kahn. He would in some ways have been a strange candidate, having failed to achieve the party’s nomination for the 2007 presidential election and spent the past four years living overseas working as head of the International Monetary Fund.

There he has pronounced on the world economy, but mainly stayed out of domestic political debate. The one notable position he took–in favor of raising France’s minimum retirement age from 60–put him at odds with the Socialist Party’s position. One senior French banker said recently that he would not be overly concerned at the prospect of a Socialist president if that president was Mr. Strauss-Kahn (who as well as being IMF head is also a former finance minister).

The Socialists’ small pool of potential candidates shows how the party has not managed to execute the kind of rejuvenation managed in the 1990s by the Democratic Party in the U.S. or Tony Blair’s “New Labour” transformation in the U.K.